Sing Sweet Nightingale (27 page)

“Mari?”

The sound pulls my eyes up, but as soon as I glance into the solid black eyes of the boy who introduced himself as Hudson, I flinch. He towers over me, and scars run down both of his arms and mar the edges of his face. He’s over-muscled and intrusive and convinced we know each other, but he’s not in this scrapbook and I’ve never seen him before.

Right?

I look up again and make myself hold his gaze. The longer I stare, the more the rest of the world fades until something glimmers on the edge of my thoughts.

“Do you know that constellation?” Hudson smiles and leans back against the grass, taking my hand and pointing my finger toward the stars. I shake my head, and he looks up at the sky again.

“It’s called Lyra, the lyre. Do you know the story of Orpheus?” He glances at me, his eyes blacker than the sky above us but warmer. My heart skips a beat and I don’t know why. I don’t know why I shake my head “no” either. My mother is a musician. Of
course
I know the story of Orpheus. But there’s something soothing about Hudson’s low voice in the darkness. Something almost familiar. And after the barrage of noise and strangeness in the party we walked through, familiar is nice.

Hudson raises an eyebrow like he knows I’m lying, but he tells me the story anyway.

“Orpheus was a musician—the best. When he played on his lyre, wars would stop and animals would pause to listen. So he had to be pretty damn good.”

His full lips curl into a half-smile. I smile back, looking up at the sky and letting his voice wash over me.

“He fell in love with a nymph named Eurydice because, you know, it happens.”

My smile grows, and I roll my eyes. “It happens” is all he has to say about a love as strong as Orpheus’s and Eurydice’s?

“He loved her so much that he went down into the underworld to face Hades and Persephone when Eurydice died. He played until they told him to just shut up and take her.”

I bite my tongue to keep from laughing and toss a pebble at Hudson’s chest.

“Wanted to make sure you were paying attention,” he says, grinning at me.

The smile brings a brightness to his face I haven’t seen before. He should smile more often.

Why do I care that he doesn’t?

I look up at the stars, tracing the invisible line that connects them into Orpheus’s lyre. After a moment, Hudson keeps talking.

“He got Hades to agree to let Eurydice come back to Earth, but Hades made him promise not to look back until they reached the land of the living. On the way out, he screwed up.” He takes a deep breath. I’m not looking at his face, but it’s like I can hear his smile disappear. “He looked too early. And he lost her.”

An almost tangible weight settles over me. I want to look at him, to see if I can do something to lift the cloud, but I know there’s nothing I can do. I don’t know what’s wrong.

“The guy didn’t handle losing her twice very well, especially when it was his fault the second time. Guilt can be a bitch.”

This time, I can’t keep myself from looking. He says it like he knows.

His eyes are closed, his entire face tight. I want to reach over and trace the lines his thoughts have carved into his face, but I stop myself before I can do anything that stupid.

Hudson’s eyes open, and he catches me watching him. My lungs contract and my heart starts pounding, but he doesn’t say anything. Not about that. He picks up the story exactly where he left off.

“He swore off women—started spending time with young boys. Which, honestly, he’d probably get arrested for today.”

My breath slowly releases, but I can’t get my heart rate to return to normal. I run my thumb along the curves of the amethyst Hudson gave me—it’s warm from how long I’ve been holding on to it—and wait for the end.

“Envy can be as debilitating as guilt, and the women of Greece are very good at envy. When Orpheus wouldn’t pick a new wife, they stoned him and dismembered him one night when they were all drunk out of their minds.”

I cringe. Of all the ways to go. What had to have been going through the minds of those women, though? What would it take to feel that kind of possession over something that was never yours to begin with? How self-righteous and egotistical do you have to be to assume you have the right to control someone else’s life and how they live it?

“The gods buried Orpheus and put his lyre in the sky so they could remember his music.” Hudson turns his head toward me, one eyebrow cocked. “Weird, considering they didn’t think it was worth the trouble of saving him from the psychos.”

He’s close, so close his breath stirs the blades of grass near my cheek. The longer he stares at me, the warmer it gets, hotter and hotter until I’m burning up. My body is on fire, but my hands are trembling. He shifts, moving closer, and I jump to my feet.

“It’s late. I need to go home,” I sign quickly.

I expect him to argue, to remind me it’s early and try to persuade me to stay, but Hudson exhales heavily and stands up.

“C’mon,” he says quietly, his hand on my lower back directing me toward the side yard. So I won’t have to face going through the house again. “I’ll take you home.”

Light swamps my vision, white light so bright it leaves orange and blue spots behind. Warm energy rushes up my body, making my head spin.

“Mari? Mari! Hold onto this!”

The book disappears, replaced by something heavy and cool. I almost scream as ear-shattering feedback shoots through my head.

My vision clears. There’s a huge amethyst geode in my hands. I glance at it for a second before my entire body freezes, my heart jumpstarting to impossible speeds.

I’m orange. My entire body is encased in an orange glow with the brightest points centered on my two nightingales—the pendant that appeared around my neck this morning and the slightly larger bird in my pocket. The light writhes and swirls like waves in a storm as bolts of cerulean-blue light pulse out from my hands. From the contact points with the amethyst.

Not since my first month of silence have I been this close to breaking my promise to Orane. I bite back the scream before it leaves my lips, and I drop the amethyst. Stumbling to my feet, I run.

“Shit! Mari!”

“Mari, wait!” K.T. calls.

Light flares again, brighter and hotter and faster than before. I trip, my palms scraping against something rough. Agony shoots up my already-injured right hand. The light gets brighter until it washes out everything, and then I fall straight from pure white into pitch darkness.

Twenty-Five

Hudson

Thursday, September 4 – 11:26 AM

Mari slumps over, unconscious. Her hands hit the sidewalk, but a stroke of pure luck makes her head land in the grass.

I had known this reaction was a possibility, so K.T. and I had brought her out to the side of the school where we’d be less likely to fall under someone’s eyes. Instinct is screaming at me to help her, but I can’t. Every time I try to touch her, the chill rolling off her burns my hands, numbing them to the point of frostbite in milliseconds.

She wasn’t this cold when I first met her, but ever since her demon has been wiping her mind, it’s like her body temperature has permanently dropped. I can feel it in her house from downstairs now; the chill emanating from her room is strong.

“Is she
glowing
?” K.T. asks, her eyes wide.

“Yeah. And I can’t touch her until she stops.”

I swallow, struggling to keep my voice from giving away how much it terrifies me to watch this happening and how much I hate having no way to stop it. The one thing I could do is surround her in stones until she wakes up, but interrupting whatever is going on in her head might do more harm than good.

K.T. bites her lip, her eyes filling up with tears. “What happened? It was like she started to remember and then…”

And then she flipped her shit.

“Did you see the colors?” I ask K.T.

“I thought the light looked orange and blue for a second, but then it was gone. That wasn’t the sun?”

“No. I think she saw that, too, and it freaked her out.”

K.T. shudders, her arms wrapping around herself. “It’d freak
me
out.” Swallowing, she looks at me. “Can we take them away? Her necklace and her other bird? If we took them now, would she know they were missing?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know what that would do to her.” I wish I could, though. I wish I could grab them and shatter them both against the pavement. “Those things are tied right into her head. Trying to take them from her might hurt her more than it helps.”

The light finally dies, and I gently lift Mari off the ground and carry her back to our bags. “Is she okay?” K.T. asks. “Check her hands for me?”

K.T. shifts her arms to look at Mari’s palms and hisses through her teeth. “Broken skin on both hands. And, seriously, she might need to go in for an X-ray on her right hand.”

Shit
. I was worried about that. But Mari doesn’t know how she hurt it. How would she explain an injury like that to Dana? And what would Dana do when the explanation is “I don’t know what happened”?

Mariella stirs, her slow blinks coming faster and her movements becoming more purposeful. Her eyes pop open, and for an instant, she’s staring up into mine.

She doesn’t flinch. For a moment, she relaxes, almost like she’s relieved to see me, but then her eyes widen and she tries to roll out of my arms.

“Careful, Mari.” I shift her so her feet are angled toward the ground and slowly stand her up. She sways, her right hand coming up to her head until she bumps it against me and sucks in a sharp breath, her face going pale.

“You fell. I tried to catch you. Do you remember?”

She swallows hard a couple of times, but her face is too pale. Looking at her hands and her grass-stained knees, she shakes her head. Biting her lip, she mimes writing.

“I sign, Mari,” I remind her. Again.

K.T. and I slowly explain who we are and where she is and what happened—well, we
kind of
explain that last part. She’s trembling when K.T. takes her to the office so she can call Dana to come get Mari. I doubt anyone is going to buy that this injury just happened, but someone needs to look at it. With the way that bruise has gotten darker and the swelling has picked up, it needs to be X-rayed. K.T. promises she’ll go with Mari to the doctor if Dana will let her, and I have to watch them walk into the school, knowing I don’t have the right to follow.

K.T. has known Mari since kindergarten, so Dana has no reason to question her concern. Me? I’m practically a stranger. I could walk away right now and lose nothing. Mariella has never technically spoken to me. It’d be easy for Dana, for anyone, to think that I have no reason to care what happens to Mari or if she’s hurt or if she falls asleep eight days from now and never wakes up again.

But I do. I care.

It’s not about ridding the world of the demons anymore. Or not
just
about that. It’s about seeing Mari come out of this haze she’s in. Watching her wake up from this half-life she’s living. Being there when she morphs from this silent, hidden girl into the glowing Grecian goddess she’s supposed to be.

But, as I catch Mariella glancing over her shoulder at me before the door closes behind them, I finally admit to myself that it’s also because I think she might be able to save me, too.

I’m sitting on my mattress, leaning against the footboard of Horace’s bed with the scrapbook spread open on my lap. Flipping through the pages, I look through Mariella’s life as it was before the demons stole it.

She was always in bright colors—turquoise cowboy boots, hot-pink ruffled dresses, sunshine-yellow pants—and always surrounded by people. Mari was on stage constantly, doing anything and everything to be in the limelight. Her face in the pictures her parents snapped of her performing? She’s nearly sublime. I didn’t know kids could be this happy. I sure as hell wasn’t when I was little.

Someone knocks on the front door, and I grab my backpack of stones, swinging it over my shoulder before I head downstairs. I don’t go anywhere without it anymore. Not with the constant threat of the demons hanging over my head like Damocles’s sword.

“Hud, Kate’s here to see ya!” Horace calls.

“K.
T
.,” I hear her correct him as I reach the front door.

Horace’s eyebrows pull together. “’S what I said.”

“What happened?” I ask K.T. before she can correct him again.

She sighs and runs a hand through her hair, pushing it out of her face. “No breaks, luckily. Two sprained fingers, though. Index and pinky.”

That’s good news. I guess. Still want to barge through the barrier between our world and theirs and break her demon’s face, but she’s going to be okay. That’s what matters for now.

“Oh, good.” K.T.’s shoulders drop, and she smiles a little. “I really hoped I hadn’t left that sitting on the grass.”